I Have Been Arguing at Dinner

Fourteen at the table on a good Sunday, and it takes two hours to serve because somebody always arrives late and somebody always has to be sent out for bread.

His mother sat at the end of that table for thirty one years. She said the same thing before every meal, in the same words, in about eleven seconds, and nobody in three generations ever thought about it because it was like the salt being there.

She was ill for a long time and at the end of it, in a room he does not describe, he told her he would keep it. That is all he said. I will keep it.

He keeps it. He says the eleven seconds. That part he has never missed.

But something else has grown up alongside it, and it began about two years after she died, and it began with a nephew saying something at the table that he did not let go.

Now, most Sundays, there is a moment somewhere between the main course and the coffee where it happens. Somebody says something about not believing any of it, or not saying it that way, or having stopped, and he takes it, and there is a discussion, and the discussion has an edge in it, and it goes on longer than anybody wants, and his wife looks at the table.

He wins about half of them, in the sense that people stop talking.

He has begun to notice that the arrivals are later than they used to be.

You may be arguing at your own table. And you may be right about most of it, and the being right may be costing you exactly the thing you are trying to protect.

Where the words go first

Now let me put the passage in front of you that every household uses, and let me make you look at the order of the clauses, because the order is the whole instruction.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:6-7

You are carrying the words in you, and that is the first clause and the one everybody skips. Deuteronomy 6:6 puts them in the heart before it says anything about teaching anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been putting them there since your mother sat at that table.

In thine heart first

The first clause is not about the children.

Shall be in thine heart. That is the location, and it is stated before anything is said about teaching anybody. The words go into the man before they come out of him, and that ordering is not decoration; the whole passage collapses without it, because words that have not gone in first come out as pressure.

And then look at what the talking is described as.

When thou sittest in thine house. When thou walkest by the way. When thou liest down. When thou risest up. That is a list of ordinary moments, deliberately unremarkable, and it is describing a texture rather than an event. It is what a house sounds like when the words are in somebody, not what a house sounds like when a case is being made.

Nothing in that list is a debate. Nobody in that passage is losing an argument between the main course and the coffee.

You are told to carry them and to talk of them in ordinary hours, and you were never told to win. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a national charter and puts it at a Sunday table with fourteen people at it.

And I have to be plain, because this is the landing category and its rule does not move: nothing here gets exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a nephew's.

Half the people at that table do not believe it. They are adults and they have said so at their own risk in a room where you are the eldest, and the arguing is the one thing that has ever made them regret saying it.

You are released from the job of convincing anybody at your own table. Scripture puts the words in the man first and then in the ordinary hours, and the Spirit of God has been at that table since long before your mother stopped saying the eleven seconds.

What the eleven seconds were

And I want to say one thing about your mother, because it is what the argument has obscured.

She said the same words in the same order for thirty one years and never once explained them, and never once asked anybody at that table what they thought about it, and never once followed anybody out to the car.

Nobody in three generations resented her for it. That is worth pausing on. Fourteen people, half of them not believing it, and not one of them ever asked her to stop.

She had the words in her, and they came out in eleven seconds before a meal, and that was the whole of her method, and it worked so thoroughly that her son is still doing it two years after they buried her.

You are standing in a covenant that reaches this house the way it always did, in ordinary hours. That is precisely what the shape of Deuteronomy 6 describes, and His Spirit has been carrying it through every Sunday you spent trying to.